Alexander Agassiz's Expedition and Other Images Collection is now accessible!

The collection, which primarily documents the expeditions and work of Alexander Agassiz, a pioneer in oceanographic research and zoological investigation and curator and director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (1873-1910), consists of 734 gelatin dry plate glass negatives, 268 film negatives, and 13 photographic prints from the late 1890s through the mid-twentieth century. The photographs were taken on the Albatross, Challenger, Croydon, and Yaralla expeditions to locations such as Easter Island, Fiji, and Australia, as well as at Agassiz’s Newport, Rhode Island, laboratory and home and at other sites. The collection also includes images taken by Thomas Barbour (who was a student of Alexander Agassiz two decades before becoming MCZ director himself) in South America, Indonesia, Jamaica, Cuba and Florida, as well as those (chiefly zoological specimens) photographed at or for the MCZ.

The images, which were digitized at Harvard Library Imaging Services, supplement related images of the three Albatross expeditions to the Pacific (1891, 1899-1900, and 1904-1905) and the Hassler Expedition to South America (1871-1872), accessible through the HUL Open Collections Program’s Expeditions & Discoveries web page.